


being no one, going nowhere

by metalgear



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Cats, Falling In Love, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Medical Procedures, Mental Health Issues, Slow Burn, Trans Male Character, slight medical gore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2020-01-05 04:34:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18358715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metalgear/pseuds/metalgear
Summary: Chaim is a Warlock-turned-surgeon who struggles to connect with his fellow Guardians (or anyone else, for that matter); Asher Mir sympathizes. A waterlogged kitten and an extended stay in the Last Safe City bring the two kindred spirits closer than they've been with anyone before.





	being no one, going nowhere

There was always something to be proven in life. Chaim took that the literal route- population models, genome sequencing, petri dish staining, and all of the related what-have-you in that department. Others took it a more philosophical route, honing their respective merits in whichever way they saw as ‘morally superior’. Moral superiority. It was a concept that he sometimes hoped he’d have never have been exposed to, that it might have died out before he was ever born.

Flesh and fat squelched beneath Chaim’s rubber gloves, a visceral sound. This was a far cry from studying the thirty-some odd types of Histoplasmoses introduced to Earth by the Eliksni, or the thumbnail-sized mites that embedded in their ‘hair’, or...really, he could go on, but the point was that the Eliksni were absolute _hubs_ of disease. To study medicine was to acquire a sort of cohabitant respect for the pathogenic world, though, and Chaim had done just that. It wasn’t the Eliksni’s ‘fault’ that they just happened to carry about a thousand pathogens capable of killing the average non-Lightbearer, no- it was just their biology, just another fact of nature.

It was just how they were made.

This was ‘just’ a cosmetic surgery. He would tell whoever asked (not that anyone would, usually) that he didn’t value any one procedure more or less than the others, but there was a certain significance to something like this that was sure to be lost on some of his companions. Standing at 6'1, thin and wiry for his height, Chaim Lewinski wasn't always pegged as trans, but there were a lot of things that he didn't 'look like'. He didn't look like a typical surgeon or a nurse, with his stark, powder-blue skin and vibrant yellow face markings standing out against a sea of human workers; he didn't look like a typical Guardian, with a gun rarely ever on his hip unless he was venturing far, far out of the city. He took a step back, stitching up his patient with precision rather than with flourish.

“Room light on.”

Asa, Chaim's begrudgingly-loyal Ghost, did as instructed, and operated the light switch remotely. It was odd to have her be involved, but with a seemingly permanent shortage of doctors around the Last Safe City, there was little that Chaim could do to protest it. Besides, she didn’t seem to mind, as long as she didn’t have to ‘get her hands dirty’, so to speak.

“Congrats, you’ve managed to _bore me_ more than I ever thought possible.”

She was already chiming in before he could strip off the gloves. Asa _always_ did, of course- her patience was maybe a hundredth of what Chaim’s was- but this particular shift seemed to have worn hard on his inorganic, inseparable offsider.

“You said that already.”

“Well, I’ll say it again! I’m. Bored.”

The faucet squeaked on, and Chaim began to rinse himself off. It would also be his duty to return his patient to their room, to check their IV and vitals, and to make sure that they were comfortably settled into their recovery before he turned them over to the rest of the medical team. Things never got easier at the City, even a year- two years?- following the Red War. Like with this surgery, there would always be cosmetic occurences to offset the downswing in combat injuries, and there would always be more Lightbearers running off to their repeated deaths than to save the lives of others. They could say that that’s what they were doing, but rarely- _very_ rarely- were they actually, directly doing so.

Constant dissociation made time difficult. ‘Difficult’ was surely an understatement, but with no one else around to correct him, he let himself keep thinking his glaringly incorrect thoughts. Chaim wasn’t sure what the purpose of all of this was, but maybe whatever deity overseeing this whole thing would appreciate what he was doing in the meantime. Maybe it didn’t matter. He did his work without expectation of an immediate or even delayed reward, just worked to work.

“Hell-ooooo, anybody home?”

Again, the faucet squeaked. Chaim splashed water on his face. He parted his lips to reply, but then decided against it. There was nothing to be said that had a real purpose.

“Right, still not used to _that_ ,” Asa sighed, somehow. “Ugh. We’ve been here for almost a day- can we call it a night?”

Chaim released the brakes on the gurney that held his patient, and Asa trailed them out.

“How long has it been?”

“You wanna guess?”

“No.”

It could have been a lot of things, but it was truly just something about the _atmosphere_ of the hospital that made it feel long-since abandoned. Sunlight beaming down through the slightly dirty window panes helped to add to the experience, mingling with both the pale green interior and the fact that, in spite of several dozen perpetually empty rooms, the hospital was nearly always ‘full to capacity’. The skeleton crew at its helm counted on shifts like Chaim’s to keep it running, and it showed.

There was no one to greet Chaim at the nurses station. They were all busy attending to patients- all 3 of them, counting Chaim. He stretched as he pushed his patient down the final lap towards their room, and he caught the tail end of a coworker poking out of the supply closet. They, like him, had been pulled from a similarly clerical job to help and supplement the growing population’s medical needs. Following his stretch, Chaim had begun to realize just how much exhaustion he had been ignoring this past nearly-full-night, and how its noxious clouds had begun to fog his judgement. In much less flowery terms, he had forgotten his coworker’s name.

“Everything’s in order.”

Chaim spoke at rather than to his patient, as they were still unconscious. Chaim just couldn’t match his Ghost’s constant, neverending extroversion, but he was by no means cold; no, it was just that he sometimes found it easier to interact with others when there was less of a social expectation hanging over them both. Asa chirped a goodbye at his patient, too, though he knew that she didn’t quite understand the practice. Chaim waved at his functionally-nameless coworker as he passed them in the hall, exchanged a few words on his patient’s care plan as he filled out final charts, and then finally, _blissfully_ , he was finished for the night.

“Nineteen.”

“What?”

He had just barely put his cloak back on before Asa had chirped at him once more. Though she was incapable of physical expression, Chaim knew that she was, somehow, smirking.

“You kept us there for _nineteen_ hours.”

The walk home was nearly another hour long, and gave him time to let Asa ramble on- which she did. She always did. He had heard this speech before, about how ‘the cause’ didn’t need him to work them both to the bone, about how he could at least try and ‘live a little’ in the in-between; Chaim didn’t quite tune it out completely, but he did let it turn to droning background chatter at some point.

Chaim’s apartment was in a somewhat ‘seedy’ part of town, though most the City could be considered that much, these days. He lived without any close neighbors, or really, any even within reasonable walking distance. It was how he liked it. The worn wooden door shed a few of its peeling paint flecks, a once-vibrant orange with a yet-more-vibrant blue hidden underneath, as Chaim pushed his key into the lock. There were plenty of places to rest in the Tower- plenty of places where he didn’t have to risk being mugged if he decided to walk home after a nearly twenty hour shift.

“I hear company.”

Asa chirped, joining a cacophony of sound from their feline doormen. That was the thing about the Tower- a strict ‘no pets’ policy (save for Colonel, but Chaim never minded her). Chaim pursed his lips a bit tighter, before picking up a large bag of cat food that was leaning beside his fridge, and dragging it over to replenish the dregs left in his cats’ food bowls. He was never gone for long enough that they ran out, but he did still worry. After a final squeak-squeak of a faucet from Chaim filling up their water, he was happy to collapse onto the couch, his overly-long legs dangling a bit over the edge and allowing one of his more daring cats to jump up and rest on him like a perch.

Chaim’s life was not devoid of heartbreak, nor was it of hard decisions; morality was just as much a part of his life as it was of the Drifter’s, or Zavala’s, or any other Guardian. Though he struggled to identify with that term- Guardian- Chaim had to figure that he was guarding _something_ , in his own right. He was preserving life, protecting it. He was doing something.

“Y’know, maybe we could try going clubbing tomorrow night, instead of,” Asa paused, and a slight ‘whooshing’ sound let Chaim know that she had flitted around his head meaningfully. “This. Again. Like every other night.”

Another of Chaim’s cats joined him on his legs, and he stretched out an arm to pet the head of one less adventurous that had taken up residence just beside his head.

“What time is it?

“9:30am. Y’know, 9:30 _the day after you went into work_.”

Oh. Right.

Chaim adjusted himself on the couch. He was running himself raw, but that would have to be an issue for another day- certainly not today. His cats milled around him as he settled into sleep, and Asa, as standoffish as she might have been, wished him a simple ‘g’night’ before he drifted off still fully clothed.

 

* * *

 

No alarm clock was more efficient than the sound of a cat knocking something heavy off of a shelf.

Chaim still felt beyond-groggy, but with his lips pursed tightly and his hands out at his sides for balance, he pushed his gangly body off of the couch and began to search for the source of the crash. The decorations on his apartment’s painted concrete walls were few and far between, but the ones that _were_ there were heavy enough (and encased-in-glass-enough) that he couldn’t waste any time in his search. Still frantically searching, rubbing his eyes a bit as he looked around, Chaim took a moment to pause.

“What time is it?”

“ _That all you say anymore? Tsk_ ,” Asa spun around his head. “It’s about 6pm.”

He rubbed his eyes. He’d slept for eight hours, longer than he ever liked to give himself.

“We need to leave.”

Chaim padded his way back into the living room, with Asa still flitting around him somewhat playfully. He scanned the floor along the way, but didn’t seem to see what had been knocked off- not until he was, quite literally, _right on top of it_. Glass crunched beneath his feet, and Chaim mused, without looking down, on just how fortunate he was to have gone to sleep still wearing his work shoes.

“Yeah, no. I’m not pulling another shift like that, and you don’t look good, bud.”

“I’m not going to work.”

One of Chaim’s cats approached to rub on his legs as he retrieved the broom; an apologetic gesture, he figured. He only kept items in his house that had some special meaning to him, but while that did mean the now-ruined print had meant a lot to him, it would have never meant enough for him to be mad at an animal for acting true to its nature.

Asa’s voice dropped an octave as she spoke again,

“Ooh. So you have got some plans for tonight, huh?”

Chaim set the broom back into the closet in his kitchen, and then clapped his hands free of dust. The epidemiologist in him was screaming to go and get changed before he even _thought_ about stepping foot outside, but a part of him- a maddeningly sparse part of him, really- spoke in a clearer and more level-headed voice, about how he should just head out of the house now to save time. He gave a cursory sniff of his robes, and thus the inarticulate screaming won out.

Once dressed and somewhat-marginally-closer-to-ready, Chaim gave a visual once over of his apartment before heading out. The cats were happy and well-fed, his clothes were neatly deposited into the laundry basket, and the light of the early-setting sun had illuminated the place in a way not dissimilar to this morning. All was well.

“So, where are we going? A rave?”

The walk to the Tower was nearly as long as the walk to and from work, and like this past morning, it gave Asa plenty of time to harass Chaim. She spun around his head energetically, rattling off places only to get the same answer from him.

“Ok, we passed the cool bar. We’re going back there later, though, right?”

“No.”

“Oh. Oh, hey, there’s-!”

“No, sorry.”

Asa flitted ahead of him, and with a distinctly mechanical sigh, she returned to her usual space just above his right shoulder.

“The Tower? **_Again?_** ”

“We won’t be there long, alright?”

It was a promise. Chaim wasn’t even sure if they’d be there long enough to make small talk, seeing as his guest had now presumably been waiting for, oh, about six hours. Again, constant dissociation clouded his sense of time, adding another layer of complication to Chaim’s interpersonal relationships. He rubbed the yellow crescent markings beneath his eyes as he climbed the first set of steps of the tower, long and winding, with Asa a- for once- silent companion in his dredging on. It wasn’t that he didn’t try. It wasn’t that at all.

Death had not been kind to him, but he wasn’t ready to examine what existed in the space before it. Sure enough, the thought did cross his mind, sometimes- was he this bad at interacting with others then, too?- but it would sure enough leave again in due time. Chaim was a neutral spirit in a world full of Ghosts, neither benevolent or malevolent. Putting it succinctly, he was dead.

“Nice to see you, Guardian!”

Chaim turned, but the speaker was not facing him. A much more lively Warlock had sprinted past him, waving to the greeter, and Chaim paused. People didn’t interact with Chaim, aside from Asa- he initiated it, or it simply didn’t happen at all. Everything that he did for the benefit of others, oftentimes wrist-deep in a biological slurry, would have been so easy to misconstrue as a desperate attempt to connect with the mortal world. It might have been, at one point. Catching an iron railing on the edges of his hip bone, Chaim was jolted back into ‘reality’, and he quickly oriented himself to his surroundings.

He could feel this, he could see this, he could smell this and taste this and stand in the middle of it. But Chaim could never convince himself that he was truly ‘experiencing’ this.

Beneath colorful cloth banners and in a cloud of fragrant food smells, Asher Mir stood leaning against a concrete wall, a fair distance away from the railing of the Tower. He was, in a lot of ways, a kindred spirit to Chaim; someone with similar- but never the same- feelings of apprehension towards the common perception of death. Chaim didn’t smile as he made his way towards one of the only men that he would openly consider a ‘friend’, though his outstretched arm hopefully did the trick of making Asher feel welcome.

“Next time that you invite me here, Lewinski, you should make good on your promise to be here within the same day as the invitation!”

Similar, but never the same. Asher Mir’s love of science, of logic, of information before anything else was a kindred ideal to Chaim, and while Chaim usually held a certain level of disdain for Lightbearers that went off to do ‘their own thing’, Asher was, unlike most of them, actually doing something to help. The ornery scribe-turned-xenobiologist may not have known the experience of picking through viscera every other day, but-

“Look out!!”

Another Guardian ran past them to Ikora, nearly knocking them both over as they passed.

- _but_ , Chaim figured that it was better than being a hot-headed gun nut. Still, Chaim didn’t smile as he cozied up to his friend’s side against the wall, but Asher’s eternal scowl did seem to be softening a bit nonetheless. Their respective expressions cemented into perpetuity were just another of their similar-but-not the same traits, in the form of Chaim’s expressionless-expression and Asher’s constant dissatisfaction with life as a whole. Those who took the time to get to know either of them would come to know just how incorrect those descriptions were, but most- like the Warlock that had just nearly run them over _again_ \- didn’t really care enough to look twice.

“You are exceptionally quiet for someone who has _wasted my time_ , Lewinski.”

“What’s there to say?”

It came out colder than he wanted, which was to say not at all. Asher’s scowl twitched a bit, and his gaze shifted over the side of the Tower once more. He was brave enough to situate himself on Io on the regular, and yet not brave enough to take a few more steps forward to appreciate the breeze.

" ** _OW!_** ”

This time, a Titan’s gargantuan shoulder had clipped them as he ran through the arch behind them, and it had gotten Asher right where it counted: in his assimilated, now-spasming from pain, arm.

“LISTEN TO ME, you wretch!” Asher grabbed the would-be passerby with his good arm, wielding the confidence of someone about a foot taller and twice as muscular. “You traipse through here without the slightest regard for whomever might simply be _resting_ rather than running off on some new quest-”

“Uh, sorry, I’m-”

“GO! I have nothing more to say to you that you could even begin to understand.”

Maybe it wasn’t bravery that kept Asher on Io; maybe it was foolishness. Chaim placed one hand on Asher’s shoulder, steering him back as the Titan ran off, and Asher only slightly protested at the touch. He didn’t have long _to_ protest it, really, as Chaim never felt quite ‘right’ about physical touch. Whether he was dishing it out or receiving it, it was more often than not unpleasant, and for awhile, it had been associated with nothing more than awkwardly stilted bedside manner for him.

“You’ll get killed that way.”

Asher scoffed.

“I know what I’m doing, and besides,” He took his place back on the wall, somewhat uneasy. “If a Titan manages to accomplish what the Vex have so failed to yet achieve, I’ll eat my remaining hand!”

Chaim’s lips perked up a bit at that, though it was still far off from a smile. Asher chuckled a dry laugh to himself, just barely audible. It was, by all accounts, an uncharacteristically animated moment for the two of them. Asher didn’t mind ‘boring’, or at least, not Chaim’s usual standard of it; the Awoken pair could often find themselves speaking close-to-excitedly about things like the state of the City’s concrete infrastructure, or the new classifications of Cryptococci infection that had sprung up since the Eliksni introduction to Earth, or the latest hypothesis on Vex social structure. Things that others might have found dull- sometimes, especially lately, even ghastly- were the typical morning coffee chatter of the similar-but-not-the-same duo.

Having settled into a discussion about the latest uncharacteristic behavior witnessed in the Vex, Chaim was content to listen and merely nod along to Asher’s rambling- but it seemed that nature had other plans. The rain was only just beginning, but if the storm clouds beginning to envelop them were any sign, they were in for a veritable downpour.

“Should we move?”

Chaim watched Asher snap himself out of his nearly-one sided conversation, looking up at the sky. He sighed, before beginning to mutter to himself,

“ _Not going to be able to stop and see Arach_...Yes, we are done here.”

“He’d probably be inside, anyways.”

Small talk was very much not his forte, especially with the other party agitated. Chaim let Asher keep muttering to himself as they departed, and their Ghosts made an attempt at something sort of akin to ‘socializing’. The unblinking, unflinching eye of Asher Mir’s Ghost was a constant reminder even more obvious than his unending anger, his willingness to fly off of the handle that grew stronger each day. Chaim couldn’t help but focus on both, as Asher kept complaining the entire walk to the apartment.

“I’ve read your study.”

Chaim looked up from where he was watching the sun set, obscured now by clouds and a steadily picking up sleet of rain. Asher’s words were short and to the point- uncharacteristic for him, but just in character for Chaim.

“What’d you think?”

Monotone as always. Chaim had heard that it suited him, but he wasn't sure; however, he wassure that it didn't suit Asher. The rain drove against the back of his neck like a million little knives.

“It was exceptionally well-written, and well-documented. I appreciated seeing the annotations of my own work, however exhaustive…” Asher trailed off, like he knew, for once, that he’s said enough. “Your comparison, in so-called ‘layman’s terms’, to the Eliksni disease that you have been studying was amusing if nothing else. The Vex...The Vex are far more advanced than any organic contagion yet known.”

Asher sighed, and turned his eyes to the sky as he walked.

“We can treat those. We can’t treat Vex Conversion yet.”

They both stopped. Chaim knew he had messed up, probably worse than he could really know, but just like always, it had been intentional. As Cayde had told him once, “your foot’s so far into your mouth that it’s about ready to come out of the other side”. Asher’s eyes pulled down from the sky, to the concrete streets that sloped down the hill still before them. Water lapped at their ankles from behind, and the ‘yet’ hung over them like the Traveler that they could no longer see for the clouds.

“This is not a conversation that I wish to be holding whilst standing in a deluge, Lewinski.”

“Alright.”

It was functionally an apology for both of them, and it was good enough to keep them going. The rain complicated the walk home nearly as much as the now smothering silence, cloying like the scent of the dried chilis hanging over the market where they had both been standing not so long ago. If Chaim was dead- and he hesitated to say ‘if’, anymore- then it was the moments like this that proved it. A true liminal space, moving and warping as it surrounded the two of them in the rain, enveloping them, consuming them like a mythical leviathan. These moments that defied definition- those were what proved Chaim’s inherent, irascible disconnect from reality.

“This ‘respite’- _mm_ , but I should not be so hard-bitten to the theory- this will be good for the both of us. A true intermission…”

Again, Asher trailed off, and again Chaim didn’t have the conviction to try and continue for him. The sun had fully set beyond the rain clouds, but it was an imperceptible difference to both of the Awoken pair; they had since reached the inner level of the City before the sun had arrived at its current point, and the brutalist architecture at their sides too thoroughly blocked their view to tell. As they turned a corner, one of Asher’s hands- the one that was not truly his, that he could neither feel nor hardly will to move- brushed against Chaim’s own hand, and the younger Warlock’s heart fluttered.

“Did you hear that!?”

When Asher did speak more suddenly, in smaller sentences, it was almost always an expression of shock- and, just as surely as Chaim knew that, he knew that he would never _not_ be caught off guard by it. Asher scurried ahead of both of them, and even Chaim’s overly-long legs couldn’t help him to catch up, before Asher was dunking his other arm deep into a storm drain’s gutter.

“What’s nutso doing?”

Asa chirped at Chaim, still likely within earshot of Asher; knowing that fact, Chaim gave a single, purposeful swat at his unruly Ghost, and began to duck after Asher. The rain was picking up, and while Chaim could afford to drown himself in a reservoir, the jury was still out for Asher. Parroting Asa, Chaim cried out,

“What are you doing?”

“Now is not the time to interfere with--”

The rest was cut off, as he stuck himself further into the drain. His ghost hovered over him, not looking down, and it was with a unique pang of anxiety that Chaim grabbed Asher’s legs to haul him out. His Ghost didn’t care- he couldn’t care anymore. Calling him a Ghost didn’t hardly feel right anymore, and if Chaim didn’t interfere, didn’t help, then Asher would be meeting his final death at the hands of the City’s run-off. Asher made a loud, frustrated “ _feh!_ ” noise from within the drain, but he didn’t otherwise protest as he was pulled out- or, not _until_ he was pulled out.

“I nearly had it!” Asher’s scowl was deep enough that it seemed able to score lines in his face, and his functional hand clenched into a tight fist at his side. The scowl fell, and his lips pursed. The rain was picking up still, and whatever he’d been chasing, he seemed determined to catch.

Asher’s hand grasped both of Chaim’s own, and he dragged him back over to the grate, still on his knees.

“Look down there and you’ll see it. There’s a kitten, it’s-” Asher paused to swear. “Chaim, before it manages to get far, you need to get down there. I can’t see it!”

Sure enough, as Chaim peered down the (albeit, incredibly dark) drain grate, he saw no signs of an animal. Asher wasn’t quite rattled, by age or the Vex alike, to be seeing things so vividly that he’d nearly jump down a storm drain, and so Chaim knew that this was a matter of life and death. Asher’s Ghost shuddered in the air, before seeming to take off in a straight line, and then return. Right, Chaim thought; this was life or death, in more ways than one.

“Ooh, finally, some _fun!_ Here, lemme help with that.” A brilliant blue light shot out of Asa, scanning the metrics of the grate for a few seconds (though they felt more like minutes), before the whole thing just...popped off. Chaim blanched, and Asher let out an amused ‘a-ha!’ sound from behind him.

Chaim gave Asher a parting glance as he took a step closer to the now-opened grate. He couldn’t see down at all, between the rain and the darkness- hell, he wasn’t even sure if there was something left down there to look for. There was a good chance that he could be leaping to his death right in front of someone who he would do anything to keep from witnessing that. Asher let go of Chaim’s hands- finally, blissfully, unfortunately- and Asher nodded.

“Try not to die.”

Asa interrupted before Chaim could answer, “We probably will!!”

Chaim looked down. He was slender enough to fit- that wasn’t the issue. He took a deep breath, lowered himself down, prepared to enter, and then felt a swift, ‘gentle’ kick from Asher at his back. As he plummeted down the slide-like entry to the storm drain, Chaim heard Asher call out from above him,

“You were taking too long!”

He tried to brace himself against the filthy, slick walls, anything to stop his descent down the twisting, pitch-black pit; Asa had tried to illuminate it for them both, but evidently, she was too far above him to make much of a difference. Chaim was acutely aware of every disease that he had ever catalogued, every study on Eliksni biology that he had ever poured over at 4am, whether reading or writing it. His mind wandered to the Vex Conversion Sickness stdy that he had just recently completed, and how if there was so much as a gallon, a glass, maybe even a _drop_ of Vex radiolaria, Chaim might meet the same fate that Asher was rapidly winding himself down to. Asa chirped and chimed, methodologically, almost like she was in danger- Chaim brought his thoughts to a standstill. It wasn’t Asa.

“I hear it!”

Skidding to a halt proved to be harder than imagined. He wasn’t even sure if Asher could hear him from this far down, nor was he even sure that the torrent of rain bearing down on him allowed sound to carry back up above, but Chaim knew that he couldn’t let that stop him. Asher wasn’t the type to just walk off if he was taking too long- not usually, at least- and so the added urgency of leaving him out in the elements was only contributing to Chaim’s growing anxiety.

Asa’s light had reached him, and still desperately bracing himself on the sides of the storm drain, Chaim began to search for the source of the increasingly frantic mewling. He couldn’t go back up empty handed, both for the cat’s sake and his own sake- and, of course, more than a little bit for Asher’s sake.

“C’mere, kitty!” Asa chirped down the drain. “There, you seeing it!?”

“Yeah!”

Chaim’s reply was forceful, barked but not quite shouting, as he finally spotted the little tuft of orange fur in front of him. He couldn’t reach it- he just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t a matter of distance, rather that he just physically _could not_ contort himself in the way that he needed to reach it. Chaim shimmied down further, bringing his feet together, and did something akin to praying.

“GOT IT!!”

Asa screeching in his ear was nearly enough to make Chaim drop the kitten all over again, but he managed to hold on with his boots. Tired, scared, and absolutely drenched, the kitten was quick to claw its way up Chaim’s leg, which made the combination of bracing himself and dealing with Asa’s excitement just a tiny bit easier to deal with. It was an equally tiring, equally terrifying, and probably doubly drenching shimmy back up the storm drain, but Asher was there with an arm outstretched to try and haul Chaim out at the top.

“Lewinski! Were you successful!?”

“I’m not out yet!”

The mewling reached a crescendo, and Asher’s Ghost greeted the exhausted little thing with a distinctly Vex-like chime as the kitten and Chaim were both removed from the drain. It had only been a few minutes at the most- _maybe_ 10, if that- but Chaim felt like he had just worked about double his shift from the previous night. Asher tapped at Chaim’s shoulder as soon as he was sitting on the wet pavement, and Chaim turned to look at him.

“I was not expecting a favorable outcome, I will admit, but- nonetheless, you were successful.”

Asher pulled Chaim into a hug.

“Thank you.”

Lightning crackled in the distance. In spite of the rain, in spite of the wriggling kitten in Chaim’s arms, of the constant fidgeting of Asher’s foreign appendage, in spite of it all, the world felt still. Chaim rose to his feet.  
  
The walk home was long, but it felt shorter than ever, once again in spite of their surroundings. The Awoken duo were uncharacteristically silent just as their Ghosts were uncharacteristically chatty to one another, Vex blips and ‘mundane’ Ghost clicks filling the spaces not filled with increasingly loud purrs. Whatever the hug had been- whatever this _all_ had been- none of them would really know. That was a question for the morning. Once they had arrived at Chaim’s apartment, he wasted no time getting undressed, this time, stripping off his rain-soaked robes and taking fistfuls of Asher’s own undershirt as they both collapsed onto the couch.

**Author's Note:**

> commission for my amazing friend peter! [pics and info about chaim here](https://toyhou.se/3703614.chaim-lewinski)


End file.
